This is the first in a series of posts we will be doing on Toki Tori. As some of you may know, Toki Tori was a Game Boy Color title before landing on Wii. There was no predetermined design for the original character, he basically started off as a walking egg and evolved from there. We ended up calling the main character a chicken, but to be honest it takes some imagination to see a chicken in our chubby hero.

It was about three years ago that we decided to renew the Toki Tori franchise with a high quality remix of the original game. This gave us the chance to take a good hard look at the character and it wasn’t long before we realized that he needed a pretty thorough face-lift, or rather a full body make-over.

We started off determining important aspects of the character. The conclusion was that he needed to be:

Cute but not too cute

Feedback from the original Toki Tori indicated that we struck a balance that resonated well with both men and women.

Entertaining and clumsy to watch in action

Our chubby friend was never the athletic type. Toki Tori cannot jump or do any other acrobatics, all his abilities come from the different items he gets to use. To communicate this to the player we made sure he looked real chubby.

able to carry and operate different items and weapons.
For the original character we could get away with a lot of things considering the low resolution. Toki Tori could never have carried the big Freeze-o-Matic on his original stumpy wings, so we enlarged those. This made him more all-round and make him more flexible for promotional activities such as the teaser trailer we released when announcing the game.

Not really a chicken

By not making him a real chicken, we can make him do all sorts of things that a real chicken could never do. Just to be sure no-one would mistake him for a real chicken we gave him duck feet :)

All these changes result in the Toki Tori that shipped in the Wii version of the game. For reference you will find some rejected designs below.

Stay tuned, because this blog is just the beginning. We will be bringing you more blog entries and exciting Toki Tori news in the coming weeks!